LEIA Moamba

LEIA stands for Lendo e Escrevendo, Iremos A Frente (Reading and Writing We Will Go Forward).

As you may know, my sitemate and I are involved in an early grade reading project at our site. We were given 150 children's books in Portuguese and instructed how to teach early grade reading. In Mozambique, primary education is not succeeding in teaching kids how to read and write. There are many causes for this problem, including lack of infrastructure, teachers, and resources. Both Sam and I have students in 8th grade who cannot read or write. We always say we think we could help the most kids if we were teaching primary school. Therefore, we are doing our best to help the kids of our local primary school with weekly reading activities. 

This past week, the primary school director handed out notebooks and pens to all of the kids in our program, and because of this, 63 kids showed up to our activities this week. Normally we have about 20. 

We always start our day with silent reading time where the kids get to choose books and read by themselves or with a friend. 

Reading Time. We don't encourage jump roping while reading so I quickly needed to take that away.

Then we sing the alphabet and introduce a couple of letters.

Singing the alphabet. They don't have an alphabet song like we do in English so we made one.

Quick stretch with our volunteer Jill before read aloud.

We read a story out loud.

Jada, a 12th grade volunteer, doing a great job reading a story.

Then we have a "tutoring" session where the kids practice reading, writing or coloring. Things get crazy during this time and I don't have any pictures.

Part of our project is also to make books accessible to the community. Moamba has an existing library, but no one knows about it and the books are extremely outdated, in many languages, and covered in dust. Today Sam and I worked to organize the books. Here is a before picture. Those boxes are old school books that no one uses.

Organizing our existing Library

Looking better!

Kid's Books

Adult books and school textbooks

We are working on making a "kids corner" with not only books but also fun activities like letter matching. We also plan to advertise the library withs signs and radio spots. Luckily we have a motivated librarian and our own copy of the key to the library.